Fish fingers and beans from a tin is what Jacob crams into his three youngest children upon his return. It is his weekly gesture towards domestic involvement. He processes both food and children very fast, giving orders like a genial Scout master. I observe him at it, because I am in the kitchen participating in John Millet’s prodigious soup-making. He makes a soup with Jane Goldman’s excess tomatoes, donning her butcher’s apron and pushing up his sky-blue wristbands to reveal the bronzed sinews of his lovely wrists. He requires, for his creation, the addition of ground rice, egg yolks, a great deal of grinding in a stone mortar and some careful sieving. Jonathan and I are delegated to dip strips of bread first into a pool of melted butter and then into Parmesan cheese which Jane draws out of her larder in a large caterer’s pack. These are then toasted in the oven and are to be eaten with the soup. Roger is at the table, once again in the cap, reading a Swahili phrasebook.
‘Jont,’ he says, ‘listen to this. “Boy, I asked you to bring all my bags. You have brought me only three.”’ There is more levity in his dealing with Jonathan than with anyone else. Jonathan laughs.
‘Jesus,’ he says.
‘Who writes this drivel, Rogsie?’ Jacob says. He takes the book from his son and examines the fly leaf. ‘German missionaries,’ he says in disgust. ‘What can you expect?’
‘The sieve is most important,’ John Millet says to me. I have done with the bits of bread and have taken on the sieve. ‘Don’t put it back on the heat, child, or we’ll have scrambled eggs.’
‘Twiddled egg soup,’ Jonathan says, playing the fool. Jane is sitting at the table with Roger, looking tired and pregnant. We eat at the kitchen table when the children have finished, and all agree that the soup is quite delicious.
‘These infants must go to bed,’ Jacob says. ‘And you too, Mrs Goldman. You look like a corpse. You bang at that klavier all day when you should be in bed with your feet up.’ He initiates the process of getting the children to bed by enacting an evening burlesque, making jokes and uttering threats which creates a crescendo of boisterous indignation. He is a great prima donna over precisely which bedtime stories he will and will not read. He vetoes everything the little ones propose.
‘Ameliaranne Stiggins!’ Annie screeches excitedly.
‘Ameliaranne Stiggins?’ Jacob says, affecting stern, incredulous disgust. ‘Backwards is the only way I will consent to read Ameliaranne Stiggins. Now John here – he’s your man. He’ll do you Ameliaranne Stiggins translated into Italian.’ John smiles. ‘Give us “Mrs Stiggins sat bump upon her favourite chair” in Italian, John.’ John doesn’t rise to it.
‘Children are your fix, Jake,’ he says, ‘not mine. I’ve left my cigarettes in the car.’ He leaves to get them. Jane selects Jonathan to wash the dishes.
‘Come on, troops,’ Jacob says. ‘Go on ahead of me. Ten seconds is all I need to finish my coffee. We’ll have the Just So Stories or the E. Nesbit.’ Surprisingly, Jacob is a traditionalist, it seems, when it comes to child literature. He swats his twins on the rump with Roger’s Swahili phrasebook. ‘Move,’ he says. ‘The lash falls heaviest on the last man to brush his teeth.’ The tiny ones go giggling up the stairs. Rosie lingers in the doorway.
‘I’m not a man,’ she says, ‘so I don’t have to go.’
‘Go, my love,’ Jacob says. ‘School tomorrow and your mother is grinding her teeth.’ Rosie manifestly gets on Jane’s nerves.
‘I want to show you my handstand,’ Rosie says.
‘Why are you such a bloody nuisance?’ Jacob says affably. She sits down in the doorway.
‘I’m too tired to walk,’ she says. ‘Carry me.’ Jane is beginning to get visibly tense around the mouth. Jacob gets up and slings her across his shoulder like a sack.
‘Come on, Flower,’ he says. ‘And go to bed, woman. You’re pregnant.’ Roger, who suffers no slight degree of revulsion for Jacob’s extrovert goings on, has quietly slipped away. Jonathan, scuffling conspicuously in the sink, appears to take it on in kind.
‘God, you’re like a bloody storm-trooper, Jake,’ he says. He does the accent. ‘Prizes for ze first man to vash himself in his own soap,’ he says. A remark which adequately exceeds the bounds of good taste. How much it does so, I realise only when I discover from Jane, as our acquaintance evolves, that Jacob’s father disappeared in Nazi Germany – a fact which causes me to deduce at the same time that Roger doesn’t balk at wearing a dead man’s hat. A martyr’s hat. He runs, as it were, not only the ordinary risk of leaving it on the bus, but the more profound risk of catching death by contagion.
‘I’ve done your dishes, Ma,’ Jonathan says, while John Millet is out of the room. ‘Everything except for the sieve. I’m not picking that effing muck out of the sieve for your poncy geriatric friends.’
‘They’re not my dishes, Jont,’ she says. ‘Did you catch anything today?’
‘I’ve given up fishing,’ Jonathan says. ‘It’s cruel. Ask her.’ He nods rudely in my direction. Jane smiles.
‘Go on,’ she says, ‘I don’t believe it. In a suffering world, Katherine?’
‘Because some things are worse doesn’t make it less cruel,’ I say. Perhaps it is a foolish debate to carry on with the wife of a man who has worn a yellow star in his time.
‘Think of the milk in your coffee,’ she says. ‘It was snatched from a suckling calf.’
‘Don’t talk to her,’ Jonathan says to me as he moves to leave us. ‘She murders greenfly.’ He almost collides with Roger who re-enters the room. Jane looks at him, watching his face with surging maternal tenderness. Jane Goldman is manifestly a great admirer of male flesh in general, but has a special thing for Roger. He is undeniably lovely. She strokes his cheek as he sits down on the table beside her.
‘Mother,’ he says peevishly, ‘if Jake is taking the car to London tomorrow, how am I getting to my music lesson?’ She sighs impatiently, wanting to love him but not to solve his problems for him.
‘You’ll resolve it, Roger,’ she says indifferently. ‘People played the violin before they drove motor cars.’
‘It’s twenty miles,’ Roger says. ‘Why can’t he take the train? He always does.’ Jane smiles at him knowingly.
‘Villainous man, your father,’ she says, ‘to use his own car when it suits him. He needs to get about a bit tomorrow, that’s the point. But, even so, if you tried asking him civilly he might leave it for you. He hasn’t got three heads. Why do you never speak civilly to him?’
‘I hate him,’ Roger says. ‘He snipes at me.’
‘I’ll tell you something, my sweetie,’ she says, with her hand again on his cheek. ‘If you talked to me the way you talk to him, I wouldn’t snipe at you. I would black your eye. Now take Katherine to watch the television. I’m tired of you.’ Roger sulks, feeling betrayed by her.
‘Is my car any good to you, Roger?’ John Millet says, generously. ‘I’m going into Brighton tomorrow to look at a site, but I should be back by one o’clock.’ Even Roger, infant wrestler with the Infinite, is not immune to the charms of a white Alfa Romeo. He stops sulking and looks up.
‘I take it that the left-hand steering won’t trouble you?’ John says.
‘No,’ Roger says. ‘I have to go at four, if that’s all right. Thank you very much. But are you sure you don’t mind?’
‘Not at all,’ John says. ‘such a small favour after all. Come with me to Brighton, if you like, and give it a try. I thought I might take in the chapel on the way back. The one with the Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell paintings. You know?’ He fixes his elegant mind for a moment on walls adorned with fruit and flowers, as we sit under the Goldmans’ Japanese paper lampshade, covered in fly spots and dust. The paper is beginning to come away from the wire frame and is spiralling gently downwards towards the table which it overhangs.
‘How very kind you are,’ Jane says appreciatively. ‘Take Katherine too.’
‘Now I’m going to take a spirit-lamp into your shed and mend some of your chairs,’ he says. He kisses her cheek. ‘Before one of your children breaks a leg,’ he says.
Over our heads, Jacob is bawling voluminously, amid great hilarity, that he will lock in the broom cupboard anyone found out of bed after a count of five.